The invention pertains to transmission infrastructures, and more specifically, the transmission of application notifications, coming from applications, to communication terminals connected to such transmission infrastructures.
Here, the term “transmission infrastructure” refers to both a communication network and to a broadcast network. Furthermore, here the term “broadcast network” refers to any type of terrestrial and/or satellite broadcast network capable of transmitting content, potentially multimedia, along a monodirectional downlink path to communication terminals. Furthermore, here the term “communication network” refers to any type of broadband, bidirectional communication infrastructure, whether wired, or wireless, particularly capable of transmitting content, potentially multimedia, to terminals, in “broadcast” mode and/or “multicast” (point-to-multipoint) mode, and/or “unicast” (point-to-point) mode.
Consequently, a transmission infrastructure may be a wired (or land-line) network, for example xDSL or fiber or cable, a T-DMB network, a satellite network, such as an SDMB (for “Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcast”) or S-UMTS or SDR (“Satellite Digital Radio”) network, a radio-based terrestrial network, such as a mobile or cellular network (GSM, GPRS/EDGE, UMTS or CDMA2000, as well as all their variants and equivalents, including LTE (“Long Term Evolution”)), or a DVB-H (for “Digital Video Broadcasting-Handhelds”-mobile television) network, or a terrestrial network implementing a technology derived from a satellite technology (such as DVB-S, DVB-S2 or DVB-RCS), or a wireless local area network (WLAN (“Wireless Local Area Network”—IEEE 802.11, Wi-Fi, ETSI HiperLAN/2), Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15), WiMAX (IEEE 802.16, ETSI HiperMAN) and Zigbee standards)), or a hybrid network, meaning one which is both satellite and terrestrial, such as a DVB-SH network (satellite links with terrestrial relays).
Finally, here the term “communication terminal” refers to any landline or mobile (or portable or cellular) communication device capable at least of to receiving content, potentially multimedia, from at least one transmission infrastructure (potentially a radio one), and potentially of transmitting content to other terminals. Consequently, it may, for example, be a landline or mobile (or cellular) telephone, (potentially an IP telephone), a desktop or portable computer, a personal digital assistant (or PDA), a “smartphone” (PDA combined with a mobile telephone), or a multimedia content receiver (for example, a decoder, a residential gateway, or an STB (“Set-Top Box”)), provided that it is equipped with communication means, potentially radio or satellite means, capable (at least) of receiving content.
As is known to a person skilled in the art, there exist ever-greater numbers of applications needing to signal (or notify) to their end users, by means of application notifications, that an event has occurred or that new information or new content (potentially multimedia) are available to them. However, due to the great diversity in types of content (text, images, audio, video, data) and the great diversity in types of communication terminals, it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not nearly impossible, for an application to take into account both these diversities and criteria for providing content specific to the end users' terminals and/or to the end users themselves, such as information about the users (such as user profiles (preferences) and limitations on the use of content (such as due to a vision or hearing impairment)), contextual information, the notifications' parameters (such as the level of priority, the level of confidentiality, the level of criticality, or the semantics of the content to be transmitted), or the characteristics of the terminals (such as the supported content format, the supported save capacity, or the dimensions of the display screen, and similar ones).
In an attempt to improve the situation, several solutions have been proposed, such as the company IBM's smart notification service, the company MIR3's smart notification solution, and the solution called “Mobicall” from the company Newvoice. Unfortunately, these solutions are not satisfactory, because they only take into consideration a (very) small part of the criteria for providing content mentioned above. Specifically, the company IBM's smart notification service chiefly only takes into consideration the type of transmission channel preferred (instant messaging (or IM), e-mail, a telephone call, SMS, MMS, and similar ones), the user context (presence, availability, and location), and the notification's level of priority in order to determine the notification's transmission channel. In other words, the only question taken into consideration, and that only partially so, is that of the way (“how”) to transmit a notification to an end terminal's user Furthermore, whenever a notification must be addressed to a group of end users, the notification may only be transmitted in parallel to all of the group's users. There is therefore no other transmission strategy for groups of end users.
Furthermore, the known solutions do not take into account adaptation criteria, such as the semantics of the content to be transmitted, the capacities (or characteristics) of the terminals, or the limitations of (or handicaps) of the end-users, nor all the different types of terminals.